Hank Butitta converted a typical yellow school bus into a small mobile dwelling for his grad school Master Final Project. He bought the school bus on Craigslist for $3000, and invested another $6000 into its transformation into mobile home. All together, this is less than a downpayment on a home, and the school bus can function as a normal house.

The transformation started with breaking down the bus into 4 sections, namely the bathroom, kitchen, seating area, and bedroom. Since the window bays in a school bus are evenly spaced, the interior space can be broken down into modular units of 28 square inches, which also leaves space for a center aisle that is also 28 inches wide.

The unique tiny house builder Hobbitat Spaces from Maryland is now taking individual orders for their hand-built homes. The company is the brainchild of Bill Thomas, and the homes are hand crafted and built to withstand even the harshest Northeastern winters. Hobbitat Spaces recently completed 13 Hobbitat cabins for Blue Moon Rising, an ecotourism retreat in Maryland. All of the houses in the retreat were built with reclaimed, local and recycled materials.

Karl Wanaselja and his business partner and wife Cate Leger from Berkley, California opted to build a home office using a retired shipping container. They chose to do so primarily because they live in an earthquake prone area, which makes shipping containers the perfect choice as building blocks. They purchased the 40 foot container, which was once a refrigerated unit, for just $1800 from the Port of Oakland.

Brian Schulz recently completed his forest house in the Oregon Woods. He built the home himself, and the design and concept of it were inspired by the traditional Japanese Minka homes, which are built using local materials and steeply sloped roofs to create affordable, open structures. For his house, Schulz used salvaged materials, along with those sourced from within 10 miles of his new home.

Frederick Corson’s 5000 square foot home in Northern California is one of the largest in the area, yet its cooling and heating costs are very low. Instead of using traditional sources of heating and cooling, Carson fitted the house with a ground-source heat pump known as a geothermal heat pump. Such a heat source is environmentally friendly and sustainable, while it also keeps the costs of heating and cooling the house minimal.

The two-story, 3660 square-foot vacation house, which will be built on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia from a shipping container has been awarded first prize in the [AC-CA] Architectural Competition. The home was designed by Czech architect Ales Javurek, while the house he designed will stand on a hillside overlooking the ocean and will take full advantage of the gorgeous, panoramic views of Bondi Beach. The planned project is sustainable not only because it is made from a decommissioned shipping container, but also because it will preserve the surrounding area’s landscape, while it is also designed to take into account the area’s climate conditions.